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Posted on Wed, Mar 17, 2010 : 7:31 a.m.

Chickens dig for worms - and mite prevention

By Corinna Borden

Our chicken digs to maintain health, to exercise and to find food.

Corinna Borden | Contributor

Aside from when it rains, and they refuse to leave the coop, our chickens are outside during the daylight hours. If it takes 30 minutes to lay an egg, that is nearly 11 Â½ hours to wander around the garden digging holes. I had no idea the extent of a chicken’s digging habits until I watched them happily shovel craters all over our garden as the snow melted.

Our mulched garden began to resemble a mogul field, to my dismay and ankle-twisting trepidation. Last weekend we sequestered the girls to the back half of the garden.

Our chickens appear to scratch and dig for two reasons: to peck for food and to bathe in the soil.

Chickens don’t have teeth. In order to digest food, there is an organ along the digestive track called a gizzard. The gizzard becomes filled with small bits of gravel. The muscular organ contracts and constricts, grinding the grains between the gravel, chewing them. In factory farms, the chickens are fed small stones. We stopped feeding gravel to the girls when they became big enough to dig in the earth and find stones and grit au naturel.

I like worms. I like what they do to the earth. I like that earthworms are a sign of happy soil. Yet, I look on with pride when my girls scratch in the warming earth and fight over a big juicy earthworm. Aside from the nutrition, I feel that it is a signpost of all things natural in the world. The early birds have been getting the worms for a long time, and I hope and trust that they will continue to do so.

After a chicken has dug a very good hole, she will often lie in the earth and give herself a bath. Dust baths are very important because the soil is prevention against mites and lice. In factory farming they use dusting powder to achieve the same results against chicken parasites. The girls are getting exercise, feeling the sun warm their wattles and doing what they are instinctively drawn to do to keep themselves healthy.

I find the dust baths hilarious, except I don’t want them happening where our new fragile plants are coming up. So the girls have been cordoned off for the duration of the warmth. I imagine sometime around October we will give them free reign again.

Corinna runs the Westside Farmers Market and blogs about all things food related (though her book is about something completely different).